BEYOND THE PIXELS

Nov 6-8 · Portland, OR

Speakers

Jared Spool

Jared M. Spool is a Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre/UIE. Center Centre is the school he started with Leslie Jensen-Inman to create industry-ready User Experience Designers. UIE is Center Centre’s professional development arm, dedicated to understanding what it takes for organizations to produce competitively great products and services.

In the 39 years he's been in the tech field, he's worked with hundreds of organizations, written two books, published hundreds of articles and podcasts, and tours the world speaking to audiences everywhere. When he can, he does his laundry in Andover, Massachusetts.

Jake Knapp

Jake Knapp is the author of Make Time and the New York Times bestseller, Sprint.

Jake spent 10 years at Google and Google Ventures, where he created the Design Sprint. He has since coached teams like Slack, Uber, 23andMe, LEGO, and The New York Times on the method.

Previously, Jake helped build products like Gmail, Google Hangouts, and Microsoft Encarta. He is currently among the world’s tallest designers.

Kate Rutter

Kate is an entrepreneur+designer and Principal at Intelleto, where she creates visual explanations that make complex ideas simple, memorable and shareable. Kate pioneered the UX learning track at Tradecraft, Co-founded Luxr.co, and was Senior Practitioner at UX consultancy Adaptive Path. She co-hosts the NSFW podcast What Is Wrong With UX with Laura Klein, and blogs at intelleto.com.

Anya Kogan Mezak

UX Design & Research Specialist

Anya is a UX professional living in Portland, OR. She has managed UX teams at Google Ads and has been an avid Design Sprint advocate and facilitator. Most recently, Anya developed a course on evaluating design for Treehouse. She can often be found riding her box tricycle around Northeast Portland full of kiddos and cargo.

Amelia Abreu

UX Design Specialist, Writer, Researcher, and Entrepreneur

Amelia is a design researcher and the founder of UX Night School. Based in Portland, Oregon, she has worked with teams at Nike, Mozilla, Microsoft Research and Intel, as well as startups and cultural organizations. She holds graduate degrees in Human Computer Interaction and Information Studies from the University of Washington and the University of Texas-Austin. Her work and writing has been featured in The New Inquiry, Motherboard, Model View Culture, and the BBC.

Agenda

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6

Full Day Workshop with Jared Spool

Measuring the Experience: Crafting Your UX Metric Strategy

Quantitative metrics are an underutilized tool in most user experience efforts. In this workshop, you'll identify the critical metrics for delivering great user experiences. You’ll learn how to turn metrics into an essential storytelling tool, that demonstrate the wide-scale effect better designs can have on your organization. You’ll explore different types of UX metrics, from success metrics that tell you when your designs have achieved your desired outcomes, to exploratory metrics that open up new avenues of creativity, value, and competitive innovation. Jared will show you new ways UX design leaders are using metrics to drive a better understanding of how UX design delivers value.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7

Full Day Workshop with Jake Knapp

Design Sprint

In this fun, fast-paced, hands-on workshop, you’ll learn the Design Sprint directly from its creator. Jake will rapidly lead you through the process, teaching how the various steps fit together and why and how they work. You’ll get tips and tricks beyond the Sprint book, and you’ll learn how to incorporate these techniques into normal meetings. By the end of the day, you’ll be able to confidently lead your own team through a Design Sprint and integrate Design Sprint methods into your product development calendar. Jake will give your team a new way of looking at business challenges and the confidence to approach those challenges with renewed energy and optimism. You'll laugh. You'll high five. You'll learn ridiculously useful skills.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8

Full Day Conference

8:00

Registration

Sign in and grab your swag, coffee, and breakfast. Come early to network with fellow creatives!

8:45

Welcome

9:00

Jake Knapp: Design Sprint Talk

To help teams at Google build better products faster, Jake Knapp created the Design Sprint. It’s a step-by-step process combining strategy, design thinking, behavioral science, and Lean Startup-style rapid learning. It also happens to be a lot of fun. Jake has run the method over 150 times with startups like Slack, Nest, 23andme, and Uber. His book Sprint was an instant bestseller and today teams around the world are adopting the Design Sprint. With stories and illustrated examples, Jake will explain the unconventional wisdom behind the Design Sprint—and show how any team can use the process to find innovative solutions and try risky ideas fast.

10:30

Kate Rutter: Chunky Learning on Slender Timelines

The UX field continues to evolve, and the tools and skills we need to perform our jobs with it. Seasoned professionals are often strapped for time and struggle to incorporate learning new skills into their schedules, while early-career teammates may have knowledge of the latest and greatest but lack overall experience and take time to onboard. Where can we find a sweet spot that allows teams to grow their skills and experiences together?

Kate shares her model for creating a culture of continuous learning in companies. She'll share experiences leading a successful UX adult learning program based on a framework of how people learn, and give concrete examples of learning tools you can apply immediately in your organization.

12:00

Lunch

Enjoy great food, meet new faces, and talk more on user experience design. Gluten-free and vegetarian options will be available.

1:30

Jared Spool: Is Design Metrically Opposed?

The world of metrics and analytics have often been at odds with how designers work. Design is a process where we finely tune our intuition to create great user experiences. Yet, sometimes, what we think is best rivals the metrics. So which do we believe - our gut or the data? In the world of measures, metrics, and Key Performance Indicators some practices, like the growth hacking approach to increasing Monthly Average Users (MAUs), have hurt the online experience of Instagram and LinkedIn. While alternatives to satisfaction and net promoter score give insight into the design process and help designers have better instincts. If you’re ready to talk to your teams about what you really need, help management interpret the data, and create analytical experiments that provide design insights, don’t miss this talk.

This talk will show you and your team:

What easily-collected analytics, like bounce rate and time-on-page, actually tell us about our users’ experiences.

Why advanced techniques, like a money-left-on-the-table analysis and the CE11, show us how metrics can impact design.